Chapter 35
The Left Side
"We'll do this slowly," said Dr. Sorel, "and you may stop whenever you like. If you say the word shoe, we stop. Do you understand?"
"Why shoe?"
"Because nobody says it by accident." She smiled, tired and dry. "Now. Take my arm."
They stood on the north approach of the Greaves Bridge at ten past eight on Tuesday evening, in a slow gold light. The river ran bright and brown beneath the first arch, and the whole long span of iron stretched away before them into a haze of midges. The cones were gone. The workmen had finished at six, and the carriageway lay empty, the lamps coming on one by one along it and the orange mesh a flat stripe in the sun. Beyond the mesh, the sky. A swallow went under the arch and out again. A man far down the towpath was calling a dog.
He hadn't wanted anyone else to come. Kovac had insisted. She stood a little apart on the pavement with her hands in her coat pockets and her black eyes on the river, saying nothing, like a heron. She wouldn't interfere. She would take no notes. She had said that if a man was going to remember something, it ought to be in front of a witness who could swear he hadn't been told.
Nora had come too. She stood on the far side of the road, by the hut, with her cap pulled low and her arms folded, so still she might have been taken for one of the lamp-posts. She had slept for ten hours in a spare room in a police house, with a woman constable outside the door. She had eaten some toast. She had given her statement at nine in the morning to a stenographer and a solicitor, in a low, steady, level voice. At four, when it was done, she had walked out of Corder Street with Kovac and stood on the pavement in the light and said, I'd like to go to the bridge. And Kovac had said, Not alone.
"Close your eyes," said Dr. Sorel.
He closed them.
"Breathe. In through the nose. And out. Don't hurry." Her voice was low and slow and without pressure, like a hand laid flat on a table. "You are in the lock-up. You are sitting in the car. You have the wheel in your hands."
"I'm not. I'm here."
"I know. We are going to go back a little."
He felt her arm under his hand, the thin wiry strength of it in its gray sleeve. The sun lay warm on his eyelids. He could smell hot stone and river and the faint green smell of the weeds along the bank, and beneath them, very faint, the coolness of iron.
"It is the fourteenth of November," said Dr. Sorel. "Twenty to nine. It is raining. You have a bottle in the kitchen, and it is a third gone, and you are sitting in a chair with your shoes on. You have been sitting there for two hours. You know that something is wrong."
"Yes."
"How do you know?"
"She said Sunday." He heard his own voice come out slow and thick. "She wasn't going to tell me. She was going to wait. And I thought, there's something she's afraid I'll say. I thought, I said the wrong thing. I said tonight of all nights." He swallowed. "I thought: she's gone somewhere to be alone, and I should go and find her."
"Where did you think she'd gone?"
"To the bridge."
He hadn't known he would say it.
"Why?"
"Because it's where she used to go. When she was low. In the winter after her father." The words were coming now of their own accord, one after another, like beads off a string. "She used to walk down to the middle of it at night and stand. She never told me. I followed her once, in the second year. I stood at the end of the bridge and watched. She didn't do anything. She just stood with her hands on the rail. I went home and never said."
A silence.
"So you went to the bridge."
"I got the keys. I took the car."
"You were drunk."
"I was clear." He frowned behind his closed lids. "I wasn't drunk. That's the odd thing. It all came very clear, as if I'd been given something. I drove very slowly. I remember the wipers."
"Tell me about the wipers."
"They went left to right. Sweep. And a gap, where it was white." His breath caught. "There was a radio. A woman's voice. She said Dunmere as if it were a person."
"And then?"
"The camera." He opened his mouth and shut it. "No. The lamp. There's a lamp at the end of the bridge. It was gold, smeared, in the rain. And I saw the car."
"Whose?"
"Hers. The silver one. In the middle. With the hazards." His hand tightened on her arm. "I stopped. I got out. I left the engine running. I didn't take a coat."
"Why?"
"I didn't think."
"Keep going."
"I walked." He felt his feet move on the pavement, a step, two, three, and heard Dr. Sorel's shoes beside him, small and soft. "The wind was terrible. It pushed on the left side of me, like a hand. I couldn't hear anything. I thought it was the wind."
"On the left."
"Yes. The ear." He stopped. "The bad one."
"Go on."
"The car was empty. The door was open. The seat was wet. I looked in. There was her bag on the floor, the brown one, and her phone was gone. And I thought, she's gone for a walk. I thought, she's gone along the bridge and she'll come back." His voice shook. "I called. I said her name. Twice. I turned my head from side to side."
"And?"
"Nothing."
"Open your eyes, if you like."
He opened them.
The sun had moved. It lay low and flat on the river, a long red-gold road, and the iron of the rail stood up black against it, every rivet and bolt picked out. He was standing at the mesh, a yard from it. He had walked there with his eyes closed, on Dr. Sorel's arm, eighty yards, without once stumbling, and he hadn't known.
"Now," said Dr. Sorel softly. "Look at the tape."
He looked.
It was a limp orange band, frayed, with a rusted staple. It was tied round the post and strung to the next. At the near end it had been looped over a bolt, and caught on the bolt, hanging down, there was something. A scrap of dark thread. He couldn't tell what.
"What do you see?"
"A yellow thing."
"Where?"
"On the tape. On the rail." He bent. The tape was clean in the dry gold light. There was nothing on it. And yet he saw it, as plainly as if six months had been lifted away like a sheet: a long swatch of wool, soaked dark and heavy, wound round the orange band and hanging in the wind, streaming out over the empty air, the one bright color in the whole wet night. "It's flapping. It's streaming out over the water. It's so wet it's nearly brown."
"What do you do?"
"I take it."
"Why?"
"Because it's hers." His breath came fast. "Because I think, if I don't, it'll go. It'll go in the river. And I'll have nothing." He lifted his hand in the air to the place where the tape wasn't and closed it on the empty light. "I've got it. I've got it, I'm holding it. It's wet. It's so heavy. And I think: why is it here?"
"What answer do you get?"
"None."
"What do you do then?"
"I stand." The words were coming slower now. "I stand with it in my hand. And I look at the road. I don't look over. I can't. I know there's, there's nothing, I tell myself, there's nothing to see." A tremor. "I think: if I don't look, she isn't. I think it quite clearly. And I think: I'll go home. I'll go home and she'll be there, in the kitchen, with the light on."
Dr. Sorel said nothing.
"And then," said Callum, "I hear something."
It wasn't a sound.
It was a pressure. It was the faint, odd, creeping feeling of a presence, the kind you feel in a room when someone has just left, at the far left of him, in the place where there was no hearing at all. He had felt it in the dark. He had turned toward it, his whole body had turned, slowly, a few degrees, from the road to the rail to the north end of the bridge, where the first arch plunged down to the bank. A shape lay in the shadow of the stonework, he saw, in the black under the pier. A dark bundle. It moved.
"Someone's there."
"What is it?"
"A person. Crouching. In the dark, under the arch, on the, on the verge." His own voice sounded very far away. "I can see the white of a hand. It's holding its face. It's," he stopped. "It's shaking."
"Can you hear it?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because I'm facing the wrong way." He gave a short dry sob. "Because it's on my left. And the wind's from the west. And I've been deaf on that side since I was nine. I'm looking at a shape under a bridge and it's making a noise, and I can't hear it. I can see its mouth. I can see it opening. It's screaming, or it's saying something, and there's nothing, there's nothing, it's like a film with the sound off."
"What does it say?"
"I don't know."
"Look at the mouth."
"I can't."
"Look."
"Help," said Callum.
He heard it come out of himself like a bone out of a wound.
"It's saying help. It's saying it over and over. It's a woman. I can see her lips." His knees went. Dr. Sorel's arm came round him and held, with a strength he hadn't known she had. "She's looking straight at me. She's holding out her hand. She's been crying so hard that her face is all, and she's saying please, please come, please look."
"And you?"
"I turn my head."
"Which way?"
"Away." The words cracked. "I turn it away. I can't see her face, I can't hear, I think: it's a hallucination. It's my grief. It's something my mind is offering me. I think: you do not cross the street." He was weeping now, soundlessly, with his face in the gray wool of the doctor's shoulder. "I told myself that. I told myself that then, in the rain. Two months before I ever met you. I told myself to turn away."
"Callum."
"She was there. She was right there. She was alive, she was ten yards from me, she was begging, and I put her down as a ghost."
He felt a hand on his back. It was small and strong and quiet, and it didn't pat. It rested. And a little way off, on the empty road, in the sudden heavy hush of the evening, he heard a sound he hadn't expected: the dry scrape of a boot on stone, then another, and then the quick, light, uneven tread of someone running.
She came across the carriageway in the red light, with her cap in her hand.
She didn't stop. She came at him the way you come at a door that's about to close, and flung her arms round his neck. Her body hit his chest, light, hard, shaking, and for an instant the three of them, the weeping man, the old woman, and the girl with the face, stood locked together at the broken rail, above the water, in the sun.
"I thought you were dead," said Nora Albright into his collar. "I thought you'd seen me, and that you were him. I thought you'd come for me. I was so frightened that I stopped calling." She was sobbing. "I saw you take it. I saw you take the scarf. And I thought: that's what they said. He's the one who watches her. And I put my face in my hands. And when I looked up you'd gone."
"I couldn't hear you."
"I know."
"I couldn't hear."
"I know," said Nora. "I know. Oh, Callum. I know."
Nothing more was said for some time. The river went on beneath them, gold and brown and quick, and on the empty bridge the lamps came on, one after another, all the way to the other bank.